Letter: Museum priorities

What a pity you chose not to quote more fully and accurately what I said at the Royal Society of Arts conference on scholarship in museums (Feedback, 3 November). All the more so since the points I made on the occasion directly address the issues raised by the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology in their letter of protest about the closure of 'research in major taxonomic areas in zoology, entomology, botany and paleontology' (Letters, 3 November).

Let me then repeat the main arguments I made at the conference.

First, the Natural History Museum faces serious financial difficulties. Our annual grant-in-aid from government does not keep up with inflation, and even though we raise increasingly large sums for ourselves (9 million Pounds out of a total income of 34 million Pounds this year), this is not enough to bridge the gap. This shortfall would have widened year by year if we had ...

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